The Vegetable Age: An Excerpt from Fresh

In the early twentieth century, produce merchants, plant breeders and enterprising farmers began to look at fresh vegetables with new interest.  Although many vegetables were as tough to ship and store as ever, rising demand made the risks look more worthwhile.  In fact consumers grew so keen on greens that Western Grower and Shipper, the California produce industry’s main trade journal, dubbed the ‘teens and ‘twenties “the Vegetable Age.” This epoch was defined by new eating habits as well as by new notions of health, beauty and fulfillment.

One of these was a growing concern about the dangers of “overnutrition.”  In the past, critics of gluttony (Thomas Tyron among them) typically pitched their screeds at the elite few who could afford gluttonous eating. By the turn of the century, the United States had more than enough food, and manufacturers and chain retailers made it ever easier to buy and consume.  Many farmers’ children had taken office jobs. According to a new wave of nutritional advice, these “brain workers” needed regimens suited to their sedentary lives. Too much food or the wrong diet would hurt not just their health, but also their on-the-job efficiency. 

Nutritionists’ preoccupation with efficiency was not in itself new. In the 1880s the chemist E.O. Atwater, founder of what became known as the “New Nutrition,” convinced many American scientists, policymakers, and social reformers that the ideal diet was based on the cheapest and most compact fuels. The human body ran fine on protein and energy, he argued, and foods such as wheat flour and stew beef kept it running much more economically than even the humblest greens.  Cabbage, for example: a housewife could get four pounds for ten cents, yet fed her family only 460 calories and less than an ounce of protein. If she spent the dime on wheat flour instead, she’d get nearly six times as much protein and nearly twelve times as many calories.

While vegetables added “relish and variety” to the diet, Atwater recommended that poorer consumers save their money and instead learn “skillful cooking and tasteful serving.” The government’s own home economists agreed.  A 1907 USDA study of American dietary patterns reported that working-class families in New Jersey spent almost fifteen percent of their food budget on oranges and celery.  These items “undoubtedly added to the attractiveness of the diet,” the study conceded, “It is true, however, that such foods could have been omitted…without materially changing its nutritive value, while the cost of the daily food would have been considerably lowered.”

Within ten years, New Nutrition appeared thoroughly out-of-date.  For one, it looked like a surefire recipe for constipation and “dyspepsia” more generally.  While these were hardly new complaints, a series of influential food fads led many middle-class Americans to seek relief in “natural” and less processed diets. Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitorium put patients on whole grains and fruit, while raw food restaurants in California served up “beauty salads” and sun-dried breads.  And Horace Fletcher, founder of the famous 100-chews-before-swallowing fad, urged followers to cut back on meat, a “once-digested, half-decaying” food, in favor of “first-hand food elements as fresh from the heart and breast of Mother Nature as possible.”

Atwater’s meat and starch diet also didn’t look particularly slimming. Since his first writings on the New Nutrition, beauty ideals had shifted dramatically: instead of voluptuous women and stout men, American society in the late nineteen-teens and twenties admired slenderness in both sexes.  Diet books like Lulu Peter’s best-selling Diet and Health: A Key to the Calories offered recipes, menus, and advice on how to avoid unbearable hunger pangs on 1500 calories a day. Dry toast, clear bouillon, cottage cheese and “hot water flavored with coffee” counted among the staples. But so did green leafy vegetables, and lettuce especially.  After all, two heads of iceberg contained only 100 calories, or 150 with a half spoonful of dressing.  Their bulk also helped dieters “keep regular.” Altogether, as one 1920s weight control manual put it, leafy greens counted among the “friends of the fat…you can eat liberally of them, have that much desired full feeling, and still feel at ease with the scales.”

Third and most importantly, the discovery of vitamins in the early ‘teens showed that the body needed more than simply sufficient fuel to run properly.  Exactly why it needed vitamins was not clear; the earliest studies only determined that lab rats languished without them.  These studies also found that vitamins existed in the foods known to prevent scurvy, pellagra, stunted growth, and even the vague seasonal malaise known  “spring fever.” Citrus fruit and fresh milk clearly contained them but so did the leafy vegetables once dismissed as “watery” and frivolous.  Indeed, vitamin researchers theorized that the “leaf-eating” habits of the Chinese explained their apparent good health, despite relatively little animal protein in their diets.

In the United States, the most influential of these researchers was E.V. McCollum.  Born in a sod hut in eastern Kansas, he went from studying dairy cow diets in Wisconsin to leading Johns Hopkins’ newly founded Department of Chemical Hygiene, where he isolated the first four vitamins: A, B1, B2, C and D. He also authored several popular works, including the Newer Knowledge of Nutrition. As the book’s title suggests, McCollum advocated a diet radically different than Atwater’s. He turned to his rural roots to explain why humans could not live off starch and meat alone. 

We know that in the early settlement of many of the states the people suffered great hardships. With little capital and no food reserve their winter diet was generally very simple and monotonous. There is good reason to believe that it was chemically unsatisfactory for the maintenance of health. After a period of several months during each succeeding winter they felt "run down.”…With the coming of warm weather sorrel pies, wild onions and dandelions grew in abundance…The cows, due to their starved condition, had been dry all winter, became fresh and milk was available. The few hens in the barnyard added worms, insects and tender grass to their diet and began to lay eggs. The garden furnished fresh vegetables…which were eaten with a relish which can be appreciated only by one who has for a period been semi-starved. The tired feeling disappeared about this time…

“Vitamines” entered scientists’ vocabulary in 1912; by the early 1920s Americans learned that their bodies depended on these invisible elements “as surely as the steam-engine depends on steam.” Foods containing them were deemed “protective” because they were thought to compensate for the deficiencies of white flour and other processed staples. As the guidebook Eating Vitamines warned readers, “highly refined foods are safe taken only when plenty of milk and green foods are taken with them.” Like McCollum, the guidebook’s author deemed milk an overall more perfect food than vegetables, noting that “the human stomach can't accommodate as much green food as the cow's seven, and she passes her store on to you in milk.” Still, given that green vegetables added to the diet fiber, minerals and balance—a key principle of the Newer Nutrition—McCollum urged Americans to “eat of them liberally.”

And what better way to eat them than in salads? McCollum’s message didn’t spread just through his many writings and lectures. Chefs adapted their menus to suit health-conscious diners.  At Chicago’s elegant Edgewater Beach Hotel, ladies who lunched could choose from a wide variety of elegant greenery, including the best-selling Doctor’s Salad (lettuce, tomato, watercress, cottage cheese, chives and cream cheese) and an all-raw Health Salad that “if masticated properly will prove beneficial to all who eat it, no matter what their complaint, fancied or real.” They could also buy their own copies of the Edgewater Beach Hotel Salad Book, which provided further information on the vitamin and mineral content of “Nature’s most prolific crops.” It was just one of many books and magazines that likened fresh salads to age-erasing tonics.  “Lettuce means health,” it said, “and health means youth.”